I’d like to see a lawyer who would argue that “any reasonable person living and functioning in society could conceivable construe that them taking 28 000 dollars worth of gas was definitely the system working as designed, and they were at no point aware that they were doing anything illlegal.”

“There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”

“I thought I’d won some kind of free gas contest, why else would my card give free gas?”

People can honestly be idiots as you pointed out.

The business holds all the cards when it comes to asking for and accepting payment. If they failed to do that in the way they wanted, it’s on them.

Ugh, really? In software development, or in developing anything that involves an end-user, such things are taken into consideration. Especially when there’s payment cards involved.

Thanks for the good laugh, this indicates way more faith in business side middle managers than is due. They ask for dumb shit all the time and make the devs do it. While I can’t rule out it being some kind of coding defect, because those also happen all the time, there’s definitely a non-zero probability that someone asked for it to work this way because it was convenient to operate or cheap to implement. Companies involved in payment processing are far from infallible, they just eat their mistakes and make the customer whole most of the time. I’ve worked at 2 different large banks, shit is held together with duct tape, prayers and throwing money at it some of the time.